Tune in to a new episode of The Living Earth Connection on Sunday, July 30 at 9:30 a.m. PST on http://www.kmud.org. In this episode I present selected essays from Exuberant Animal: The Power of Health, Play and Joyful Movement by Frank Forencich. Frank is an author and movement educator who examines health and fitness through the lens of our evolutionary heritage.

Drawing on our biological history, our evolutionary heritage, when examining our lives and experience, helps us to counter delusional and damaging cultural mythology. For instance, accepting the fact that we are animals, runs counter to the foundational cultural belief that we are a superior life form, who is meant to rule the world as we see fit.

Learning how to live as just one member of the Community of Life, once again, necessitates embracing ourselves as animals.

In order to fully appreciate the biological world we belong to, this Great Mystery we call Life, we need to be fully alive ourselves. Living beings detect the livingness in the world around them. The meaning of Life, it’s sacredness, is something that we feel.

Fully experiencing the vitality of Life through our bodies is a sacred act.

Please tune in for a new episode of The Living Earth Connection this Sunday, April 30 at 9:30 a.m. PST on kmud. In this episode I present a wordless meditation through instrumental music.

At the root of the ecological crisis, lies our cultural belief that we are the rulers of the world. We believe that humans are superior to, and quite separate from the rest of the community of life. Rather than knowing that we belong to the community of life, we think the world belongs to us, as resources to be used however we wish.

Related to this inaccurate and destructive belief, is our cultural belief in the supremacy of words and logic. We rank other modes of being and communication as inferior or unimportant. This bolsters our sense of superiority and separation from the community of life. However, language and logic are but one aspect of our capacities, with limited usefulness. We dismiss our full capacities to our peril. We do better when we remember that we are bodies, we are animals, with senses developed to navigate the world. Reconnecting to our wordless selves is a powerful experience.

In this episode we reconnect to our wordless selves through instrumental music. Music is an inexplicable urge that predates language in human experience, and we share this urge with other animals.

John Hardin composed LEC’s wordless meditation, off the grid, in his solar powered studio, using a collection of instruments he mostly built himself from recycled materials and found objects. To learn more about John’s music, and see pictures of the instruments, go to www.electricearthmusic.wordpress.com. Go to www.kmud.org to hear this episode live or archived under Sunday Spiritual Perspectives.

What are we to make of a culture that does not provide good health for most of its members? While the traditional diets of indigenous cultures provided their members with robust good health, our culture has spawned three multi-billion dollar industries centered around poor health. The food industry creates foods that lead to ill health, while the health care and the pharmaceutical industry, at best, treat the symptoms of illness. In all our talk about health care, what gets overlooked is our need for health.

Listen to The Living Earth Connection to hear a deconstruction of the myth that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease. I present selections from Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Dr. Mary Enig and Sally Fallon. Dr. Mary Enig was an international expert on the biochemistry of food and fat. Sally Fallon is the president of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Weston A. Price studied and documented the health of indigenous peoples who followed their traditional diets, in the early 20th century. Tune in to http://www.kmud.org on Sunday, January 29 at 9:30 a.m. PST.

The Living Earth Connection episode # 20 airs this Sunday, October 30. In this episode I present selections from The Ancestral Mind by Gregg Jacobs Ph.D.. Our Ancestral Mind is the preverbal, intuitive and unconscious emotional mind. Our Thinking Mind is the rational, verbal and self conscious mind. While Dr. Jacobs emphasis is on how these two aspects of our mind function, and how our overreliance on our Thinking Mind causes much of our ill health and unhappiness, there is also much to learn from these two forms of human consciousness, regarding the beliefs and actions that cause the ecological crisis. Please tune in on Sunday, October 30 at 9:30 a.m. PST to http://www.kmud.org.

This Thursday, October 27, Wildlife Matters looks at the Humboldt Marten. Once feared extinct, they were recently rediscovered in Six Rivers National Forest and Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. They used to be numerous throughout the “fog belt” of coastal old growth Redwoods, Doug-fir and Sitka forests, from Sonoma to the Oregon border. Now they number less than a hundred. To find out more about these small carnivores of the Mustelid family, tune in to http://www.kmud.org this Thursday, October 27.

The Living Earth Connection # 19 is available to download or stream. In this episode I perform an intention ceremony to end the Green Rush and steer Humboldt towards Life’s highest possibilities for the land, the wildlife, and the people.

The Living Earth Connection #19 airs today, Sunday, July 31 2016, at 9:30 a.m. WST on kmud.org/ 91.1 and 88.1 FM. In today’s show I focus on the massive expansion of the marijuana industry in Humboldt County, called the Green Rush. This agricultural and industrial expansion, located in valuable habitat, devastates the environment. The fragmentation and degradation of habitat by Humboldt’s marijuana industry, has accelerated in recent years. This ecological devastation is the outer manifestation of a deep spiritual sickness. In today’s show I perform an intention ceremony to end the Green Rush and steer this region toward Life’s highest possibilities for the land, the wildlife, and the people. Please tune in.